tw: suicide

Mental Health Monday – Awareness Month

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This past Friday, Mental Health Awareness Month began.

I never really thought about my mental health. I had things I felt – anxiety, sadness, too much of this, too little of that, and I never looked further. I was too young, being organized isn’t a bad thing, eating four M&Ms at a time isn’t problematic. The list goes on, and it ranges from what sounds like nonsense to what can grow into real issues, not just for me but for the people around me. My mental health issues don’t fall into illness categories, not everyone’s issues do. Sometimes we dismiss it as idiosyncrasies, or cousin Jane is just like that, it’s a preference. Our mental health affects not only ourselves, but the people around us especially if you live with family or friends, have work colleagues, hobby partners, etc.

Again, until I became suicidal to the point that I noticed a problem and addressed it with my doctor, it was overtaking all of my thoughts. Until then, it fell into the characterization of a shrug, something I do, and something I just live with.

Once I was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety, I could look back all the way to childhood and see things that I did and felt that I thought were “normal” or things that I was blowing out of proportion with no genuine reason for feeling how I felt. One example of this was when my parents were out of the house. We lived in a split level, so there was a short staircase near the front door, and I sat on those carpeted steps in a heightened state of anxiety waiting for them to get home. Was I six? Ten? No. I think I was sixteen and much too old to be in this state because I was alone in the house. I’m not even sure I was alone in the house – I have two siblings; they may have been home, but it was nighttime, and my parents were not.

I have been on medication since 2012. Medication was not the only answer, but I consider it a large part of my recovery. Medication is not a dirty word; there is nothing to be ashamed of in taking medication to regulate your brain. I take medication for my diabetes and high blood pressure, and no one questions why I take pills instead of just “feeling better” or “calming down”.

Here are five things to do right now or when you wake up or just before you go to bed or whenever you want to do them. You decide what works for you. I was on the phone with someone for my job and I had tried to say something pithy, intelligent, and comforting and what I said was whatever works for you is – *long pause*, well, it’s whatever works for you. I don’t know if it’s intelligent, but it is certainly pithy. It’s also true. I can suggest hundreds of things to do, ways to think, lists upon lists of how to get through the day, but in the end,whatever you decide works for you is what works for you.

Here are those five things that work for me:

  1. Close your eyes and breathe. Through your nose and out of your mouth.
  2. Read a book. Any book.
  3. Color or draw. You don’t need to be an artist. Doodle. Scribble. Something mindless and colorful. Try it for five minutes.
  4. Turn off social media (unless turning it off gives you more anxiety). Not permanently. Turn it off for five minutes. Maybe ten or even fifteen. There is nothing happening online that can’t wait five to fifteen minutes.
  5. Drink a tall glass of iced cold water. Hydration is always the right answer.

Have a good week.

The Mental Health Monday posts for this month will also be crossposted on my Substack.

50-44 – Postpartum Depression

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​When you give birth for the first or second time, the expecting books, the online information sites, and the doctors and nurses are very much aware that this is new for you, and they take great care in giving you as much information as possible including on postpartum depression.

postpartum depression can occur in women who’ve had no other history of depression.

You are told very clearly what to look for: loss of appetite, fatigue, lethargy – because none of those things happen when you have a new baby unless you have depression, right?

Two other symptoms to watch out for are if you can answer yes to the following questions:

Do you want to hurt yourself?

Do you want to hurt your baby?

Since my answers to both of those questions were  resounding NOs, I knew I was in the clear.

Despite that I couldn’t make decisions or do anything that wasn’t taking care of the baby, or even lying on the floor with the tiny baby, both of us crying hysterically. It went on and on, and every time I thought I must be depressed, I need to see a doctor about this, I would go back to those two questions and answer them:

No, I do not want to hurt myself. No, I do not want to hurt my baby. I just need a vacation; a day off. And I muddled through. I just wasn’t strong enough to handle a second baby. I must be doing something wrong.

Not to mention that my mother had just died; eight weeks after the birth of my son, which came eighteen months after the death of my dad. Of course, I was depressed, but I wasn’t, you know, depressed.

It wasn’t until eight years later and actually becoming suicidal, wanting it all to just end and being diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety was able to look back at that time, lying on the floor crying, not wanting to do anything but sit in a chair, sometimes holding my baby, not cooking or wanting to eat, did I realize that I did, in fact, have postpartum depression.

It’s hard to look back and know that if only I’d looked deeper into it, I could have come to of it sooner. As it was, when I became pregnant with my third child, when my second was only six months old did the hormones kick in, pushed the depression away, and saved my life.

I was miserable, and I had help. My husband stayed home and worked as often as he could, especially after baby number  three was born, and my mother-in-law visited and stayed with us for extended periods to help us out and visit.

We need to listen to new or not so new mothers when they complain about how hard it is. Even if we complain all the time, we need to take a special listen after the baby’s born. Offer support; don’t wait until it’s asked for. By then, it’s probably too late and the request is coming from a shrieking, arm flailing door slammer.

The questions shouldn’t be will you hurt yourself or your baby; the question should be how are you, are you okay, can I help? Do you want me just to come over and watch you and the baby sleep for an hour?

postpartum depression is hard to recognize. I never recognized it until I was on anti-depressants and in therapy for about six months. I was lucky. I never wanted to hurt my kids. If they were with me, I wouldn’t hurt myself, but looking back it is one of the scary experiences I’ve ever had, more than when I was actually suicidal.

The good news is that I came out of it. I survived. I look at my kids everyday and I’m glad I’m here with them. I survived and I’m still surviving. I’m hyper-aware of how I feel. I have my coping mechanisms, which I’ve adapted to over time.

Don’t let anyone tell you you’re crazy or imagining things. Take care of yourself first. Love yourself first. Always keep fighting.*



[*Always Keep Fighting and Love Yourself First are from the Always Keep Fighting (AKF) campaign to raise awareness and fight depression through Supernatural actor, Jared Padalecki’s charities.]

Depression =/= Unhappy

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(Note: I write about depression on a fairly regular basis. I don’t know how long I’ll continue to talk about Robin Williams. I am profoundly saddened by his death, and I may find that I’m repeating myself. I was shocked, and I am still in shock. It is a very sad day for many people, but my thoughts and prayers are with his family. I can remember the shock of my mother’s death, and while it wasn’t a suicide, it was sudden and unexpected. I hope that they can heal and move forward.)

 

I recently posted about the passing of James Garner. He truly was one of my longtime heroes from my childhood. Of course, he was in his 80s and I’d been expecting to hear about his passing, and was pre-sad in the waiting.

My sister does this thing on Facebook. She posts when celebrities die. It’s kind of an informational thing, but she is always the first, and it’s always a huge shock to family and friends when she misses one. Yesterday, I got a text message from her telling me that Robin Williams had died.

I gasped and stared at the phone. I had been midsentence talking to my husband and he asked what and I couldn’t speak. My eyes welled up and I put up my hand to kind of say wait a minute, I can’t say the words. I couldn’t say the words. They got caught in my throat and part of me thought that if I didn’t say it out loud, it wouldn’t be true.

Robin Williams died.

His eyes reflected my own shock. We put the television on and saw the headlines, possibly suicide. This was beyond belief. I knew that Robin had more than his share of problems over the years: drug addiction, his struggle with sobriety, heart surgery, even depression, and he’d come through it all.

His kind of genius was either snuffed out at twenty-something or he was safe from the demons.

Whenever his name was mentioned on television or in the news, it would never cross my mind that he might have died.

Robin Williams was supposed to live forever. Forever.

How is it possible that his energy, his vibrancy, his manic hilarity is silenced? How does the world keep turning when Robin Williams isn’t in it any longer?

In the past eleven hours or so, I’ve read of many fans’ shock and disbelief, some knowing that in the heart of many a comedian lives the darkness of depression, but many others asking how someone so funny could be depressed enough to kill himself. He had a great life: marriage, three great kids, a career, a ridiculously funny sense of humor, a humanitarian, money and he was well loved, not only by his fans, but by his fellow actors and his family. How can someone so happy be so sad on the inside?

I posted a statement in response to this and said, “It is so important to keep repeating: DEPRESSION HAS NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING TO DO WITH HAPPINESS.”

I was asked about this earlier this morning, and I do understand that people who are not exposed to depression might not understand the severity and the forms it comes in. I didn’t understand how depression worked just a couple of years ago, and unless people know someone with depression, most people misunderstand how serious it is.

 

I describe it as an iceberg. The part that you can see from the outside is so much smaller than the actual problem. So much of what is there is lurking below the surface, waiting to pull you under when you least expect it.

There are three types of depression (that I’m aware of). The mood descriptor is the most confusing because it uses the word ‘depression’ and we talk about being so depressed, and so when we are talking about the clinical, chemical imbalance, physical manifestations of the mental illness, it is often confounded with the much less serious depression or down mood.

When you are down and your mood is depressed, this is a normal emotion and feeling and we all get that every now and then. Sometimes there are reasons for the down mood, and sometimes it’s a lightweight apathy or boredom in a moment, and it always passes. One of the reasons that the miscues come from is that we should really use a different word when describing the depressed mood rather than depression the mental illness.

This comes and goes and everyone gets in this kind of mood now and again. It comes, it goes away, and that’s all normal.

The second form is situational depression. This might need medication temporarily or it might need close observance. It definitely should be seen by a doctor to make sure that it is situational. This type crops up when something big hits you unexpectantly: someone dies, you can’t afford to fix your car and can’t figure out how to get to work, you get seriously ill, a friendship ends – the kinds of things that pop up and are more than just a minor sadness that will pass. It is serious, but it’s not clinical. There is a reason for it and everyone’s reaction to the same stimulus will be different. This strikes me as an emotional response but more than a simple moodiness.

Clinical depression (and I don’t know that this is what Robin Williams had, but clearly he had something), (and this is what I’ve been diagnosed with) is that feeling of nothing. Mood swings, bursts of inappropriate emotion in both happy and sad directions, lethargic, nothing feels right, everything feels empty. For me, I just stopped. Everything. I couldn’t get out of bed, I couldn’t cook, I didn’t want to do anything, and it was well beyond just being lazy, and ever worse was that I didn’t care that I felt this way. It didn’t matter; nothing mattered and I was okay with that.

My husband would ask if I wanted to use the computer and I’d shrug. I’d sit in the dark, not doing or looking at anything; not sleeping. I thought about the logistics of driving my car over a bridge, and how reasonable it sounded. My best friend would get on the phone with me and ask if I was drunk – I was so out of it – brain fog: I couldn’t remember things; I didn’t know if I’d eaten or when I’d showered last. I forgot appointments and my children’s assignments. It’s serious, and in retrospect, I’ve always had some form of depression with varying degrees of severity. I didn’t realize it until I was suicidal, and it has nothing to do with cheering up or having a good job or being happy.

It’s also scary because you’re alone and at the point you don’t care about being alone, it’s already almost too late.

I also liken my recovery to being an alcoholic. There is always the chance that it will come back or rather it is never gone. I need to be vigilant and aware of how I’m feeling and if I’m in a normal mood or if I’m coming on a more depressive one (like I’ve been feeling recently).

I’m on medication, I’m in therapy, I have coping mechanisms and friends who understand and support me when I’m having a bad time of it, but I can also feel it most of the time and I’m in a constant state of checks and balances to make sure that my meds are working. When it’s really bad, I go back to my lists, listing every infinitesimal detail of my day, including eat breakfast and take a shower.

I hope this isn’t too much of an info dump. These are questions a lot of people have about depression and its misrepresentation in layperson circles, including my family that just don’t get it (and that’s not their fault), so I go to people who do understand; people who can support what I need when I need it.

Writing this makes me feel a bit better. It’s good to be able to change the idea that someone who commits suicide is weak when really it’s that they can’t control the avalanche when it’s coming down on them and burying them alive.